Crawford says Jamaica is a 'Strange land' due to violence and loss of values

Jamaica has become a “strange land” where hunger, poverty, violence and the breakdown of community values are increasingly being accepted as normal, according to St Catherine North Western MP Damion Crawford.

Crawford delivered the stinging assessment on Sunday as he addressed the public session of the People’s National Party’s (PNP) 88th annual conference at Independence Park in Savanna-la-Mar, Westmoreland.

“They can't get lunch,” Crawford declared, as he painted a grim picture of children from poor families lining up at school for meals.

He said the experience was particularly painful for children who face embarrassment while waiting for something as basic as food.

“They have to go into a line of segregation for the children of the poor to face embarrassment because they're waiting on rice and gravy with the hope that a piece of chicken foot escape,” he said.

Crawford said he was not accustomed to a Jamaica where children are increasingly exposed to gambling, promiscuity, alcohol and abuse, while communities appear to be losing their sense of concern for one another.

“I am not used to a country where two don't matter,” he said.

He also sounded the alarm over teenage pregnancy and child hunger, citing figures of 60,000 young girls having babies before reaching their teenage years and more than 100,000 children going to school hungry.

Crawford said Jamaica needs to rediscover the collective responsibility captured in the old saying that “the village raised the child.”

“We must return Jamaica to a Jamaica that we are comfortable,” he said.

He argued that the country's problems should rise above political divisions and called on the PNP to build what he described as a “coalition of conscience.”

According to Crawford, Jamaicans from different backgrounds and political persuasions should be able to agree on basic principles — that hungry children deserve food, sick people deserve healthcare and academically successful young people deserve opportunities to pursue tertiary education.

“We must open the party and welcome all those that are willing and all those that are able to join us in this People's National Front,” he said.

And as he closed his address, Crawford made his allegiance to the PNP unmistakably clear.

“I am PNP now, PNP then, and PNP forever, comrades,” he declared.

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